A Warning Voice

Bryan Podmore talks to Barry Unsworth

Barry Unsworth was born in 1930 in a mining village in Durham and attended Stockton-on-Tees Grammar School and Manchester University. He has spent a number of years in the eastern Mediterranean region and has taught English in Athens and Istanbul. He now lives in Italy but interviewer Bryan Podmore met up with him in London.
His first novel, The Partnership, was published in 1966. This was followed by The Greeks Have a Word for It (1967); The Hide (1970); Moonraker's Gift, which received the Heinemann Award for 1973; The Big Day (1976); Pascali's Island which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980 and filmed; Sacred Hunger which was the joint winner of the 1992 Booker Prize; Morality Play which was shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Prize; and After Hannibal (1996).
His latest novel, Losing Nelson, has been called " a brilliant and disturbing analysis of heroism and the enduring battle between darkness and light."
Barry Unsworth is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Interview
It is marvellous to catch you in sweltering London while you’re over here from your home in Umbria for the launch of Losing Nelson. I’m very conscious of so many questions and a million points of entry in the novels where I might say ‘Let’s move out from here or on from here’. Some of these will come into focus as we go along but I really do hope that we shall hit those areas that continue to matter for you.
Is it possible for a start to indicate what for you are the abiding pleasures of writing fiction?

BU: I think there are two aspects of it. I’ve been doing it a long time, first trying to do it and then doing it after a fashion. This is my thirteenth novel and so in a certain way when you write that much and you spend your time with fiction to that extent you set up your own cycle. You have the gestation, you have certain phases that you recognise as recurrent so that becomes a way of life to the extent that it becomes habitual, it becomes necessary. The satisfaction involved there is the satisfaction of following an accustomed practice. But the primary impulse of any kind of narrative is, I think, the sense of a unique perception. Whether it’s unique or not, whether it’s commonplace, the writer should feel that he possesses some secret and he wants to communicate it; there is a pressure. I think the fulfilment of that is certainly an abiding satisfaction
Above and beyond that, there is a feeling always of the imposing of order in a world which seems disorderly and worse than disorderly. There is an illusion of order within confines, within certain limits; you have a sense that what you do is meaningful and so that’s an organisational sort of satisfaction, a satisfaction of control because within those limits you have control. I think those for me are the basic satisfactions of the trade

You talk in earlier novels as again in your latest novel, Losing Nelson, of the author having a godlike function, not you but the writer within the novel, having almost a temptation to act God. That is part of it?

BU: That is an aspect of the control. It's almost a paradox; the writer of fiction evades direct confrontation with the universe, he hides behind a borrowed persona and takes refuge in the vicarious experience and so while this is going on the author has a sense of power because he can decide matters of life and death . He has a certain absolute freedom. I think on examination it may not prove so absolute; it may be within the limits of his own cultural and social setting and the nature of his time and his own intellectual equipment - there are all sorts of qualifying attributes but the illusion is there; you sense you can be an arbiter of destiny. And so, on the one hand, you have this and on the other you have this evasiveness, this borrowing of attributes. It amounts to a fairly paradoxical situation.

Aligned with that, it seems to me, and here I hope I’m taking things that I’ve been finding in your fiction more than just theorising on my own behalf, there is something about detachment and commitment, with the detached author looking at and indeed preoccupying himself with committed, obsessed people. You are drawn to them, aren’t you?

BU: Yes, I am, and that’s an interesting point too. The authorial detachment and this dwelling upon highly disturbed and fanatical or obsessed states of mind. It’s a truism but it’s only in detachment that you can see things in their fullest human implications. There’s something cruel and clinical, of course, in the observing eye. There’s an element of cruelty certainly in standing away and looking at disturbed states of mind that you are in fact manipulating for the purposes of a pattern. It’s all highly dubious stuff!

If we are talking in these terms, does it at all ‘salve your conscience’ to write in the first person?

BU: No, I think that’s purely a technical choice.There are times when it seems appropriate to write in the first person, to find a voice or an idiom different from your own.

And you usually know from an early stage that it’s going to be first person?

BU: Yes, I do. With Losing Nelson, that’s this new novel, I knew from the beginning it had to be a crazed first person as narrator and I think I generally have known that. With a larger novel like Sacred Hunger it would be cumbersome to be restricted to the ‘I’ so I think these are technical choices. There is a conscience at work. There’s a temptation always to exploit people you meet in life and to use them and to turn them into fictional characters.

I hadn’t realised until very recently quite how much of your own experiences, even to property transactions in Umbria, were being fed into your novels.

BU: Very little really.

There are still key moments, as in Sugar and Rum [the novel set in Liverpool], where you were having a block at the time.

BU: Yes that’s right. I used a blocked writer in Liverpool to extricate myself who was a blocked writer in Liverpool at the time. I used that.

One of the obligatory questions to ask you is about influences. I expect you’re tired of being asked how much of Conrad do you feel is around you and how much of Golding is there. I don’t think we can tackle Sacred Hunger head on because if we do we shall spend all our time there but certainly I sensed a Conradian ambition there.

BU: Yes, well, Conrad was certainly a strong influence -and Golding too - an early influence.

Were there other less obvious influences?

BU: Earlier influences were a bit less obvious . The first people I read that made me feel it would be a good thing to be of the company of writers, that is not to say that I wished to emulate them exactly or rival them but only to belong, however much on the margin, in that tradition of writing fiction, were American writers from the deep south. I went to school in Stockton-on-Tees which was something of a cultural desert in those days, this is the forties and fifties. I read Eudora Welty. I remember reading A Curtain of Green ,the first collection of stories, and thought they were so wonderful . My own early stories were very derivative, a bad combination of Mississippi and Stockton-on-Tees - it didn’t work and I collected lots of rejection slips

Did Faulkner come in?

BU: Faulkner came later. I have a great admiration for Faulkner; he has that same quality of gothic with hysteria never far below the surface, which I found fascinating at the time. It was literature of excess to me and compared very favourably with the really rather tame English regional novels that were being written in the fifties before Look Back In Anger and similar material came out later on. That was the way it went with me and then I struggled through to try to find a voice of my own which took quite a while.

Did you from that and from other influences find yourself inclining to put characters right on the spot, to land them in extremis, which is a Conradian motif?

BU: Yes. It’s generally supposed to be a technique of theatre, isn’t it, to begin at an extreme situation or an extreme moment rather more than it is for the novel but I think, insofar as the novel can imitate the theatrical mode, so much the better.There should be an extreme of feeling or behaviour, there should be a resolution, there should be some shape. You can go from intensity to relaxation or you can go the other way. Both of them are acceptable fictional patterns. To choose, I think I would try to find a moment where things haven’t reached the extreme that they are going to reach but they are clearly and visibly, to the reader, on the way. As with my Nelson-worshipper in Losing Nelson who is already clearly from the beginning not deranged but disturbed .

I wonder if there are any points to be made about the germs that get you going. Are you an overhearer, do you see images, do you work out from such elements, or is research clearly the dominant mode, the way in?

BU: It’s largely accidental. I don’t think Sacred Hunger or Sugar and Rum would have been written if I hadn’t gone to Liverpool and I only went there because there was a post as Writer in Residence at the university. I believe I was the first and last writer they ever had; I think they ran out of funds. I was there for fifteen months and by going in I stumbled on Liverpool. As we said, I had a block and there was the slave trade interest... The focus of interest on the Atlantic trade was really accidental in the sense that I hadn’t any such interest before I went to Liverpool. That's one way of starting. I started Morality Play because of an anecdote that was told me 20 years ago and I made a note of it, thinking it might prove useful some day, just this idea of a theatrical troupe acting out a local event in order to raise the curtain, perhaps a dangerous thing, they could choose the wrong event. It could be interesting so I wrote it down long long ago and it finally surfaced again.

There are various ways in which you can start off. It doesn’t much matter how you start in a sense; it’s how you finish that really matters. Yes.... sometimes beginnings are tortuous and tormented. I don’t always see clearly what kind of a story I’m going to make and especially earlier on. I’ve gained confidence over the years. I haven’t gained confidence in my abilities; I haven’t gained a sense that what I’m doing is good. I’m still as uncertain as ever; I still need the same sort of reassurance that I always did.

Where does that come from?

BU: Well, now it’s my long-suffering wife who gives me most of that.

You don’t look to the critics for help?

BU: No, it has to be someone whom you can rely on completely, who wishes you well, whom you can rely on to be constructive and honest. Those things still persist but there’s a certain inherent sense of an increased skill.

I was asking about germs and en route we’ve touched on your use of your own experiences and I realised you were doing a Hitchcock again in Losing Nelson, giving a glimpse of yourself. You reappear as in Sugar and Rum. I’m interested in that because it presumably amuses you to do that and it certainly amuses the reader to find you there in your own novels and it allies with a very big issue which we can only touch the fringes of. That is the question of cinema. Taking cinema to be the dominant medium in our century, how do you stand in relation to it, how do you stand in relation to the films of your work. There is the film of Pascali’s Island and promise of a film of Sacred Hunger? Is that still promising?

BU: No, that’s gone off the boil. It wasn't going to be a film; it was to be a series. It was going to be done in eight episodes on Channel Four. We did the script and we were nearly there, then the whole project was cancelled. And then it’s somehow gone away. They bought film rights for Stone Virgin but never made the film. They optioned it but they never made it.

Sad. I want it. I want to see that, with its setting in Venice. I loved the novel.

BU: I’d love them to do it. They can’t get a script together and I don’t think they will now. Again, it’s lost somewhere. Morality Play is under option with Renaissance Films and that looks as though it could happen. We have high hopes of it. Nothing is very certain; it’s a very uncertain industry. In fact, up to now Pascali’s Island is the only novel of mine that’s been filmed.

What do you feel about the cinema? It’s a truism about its impact on our times, isn’t it? Do you stand apart from it?

BU: Yes, I’m sure it has great impact. I love cinema and see it whenever I can. I haven’t got the visual sense you would need for seeing how things can be turned into film or theatre. I think my work is visual so it does lend itself to film treatment probably but you need people able to do it and you don’t always find them.

Your presence in the novels, it seems to me, is very evident at times. You have in there, you might agree, certain alter egos. I made a sort of checklist of them - some are fairly obvious like Benson, the blocked novelist, in Sugar and Rum. Now someone from outside might want to try to identify or even categorise them. Does making use of them constitute part of the pleasure you take?

BU: I think that is part of the pleasure. There are alter egos. All characters in fiction are composite, partly derived from life, partly from imagination and you wouldn’t know where the lines join. Quite a few of my earlier novels were actually based on a dichotomy of characters, novels like The Hide, which is carried on in alternate first person narrative by two narrators, very different in tone and character, Simon and John. And then in Pascali’s Island there is Pascali and Bowles, two aspects of the trickster, and both of them I felt to be reflections of my own sense of the novelist as a kind of con-man. And so there has been that duality in many of the novels.

Allied to that - or is it just me wanting to make sure we get to this? - there is something that struck me very forcibly in Morality Play, another novel I enjoyed immensely, devouring it wholesale. There are these remarks about making meanings:
‘Players are like other men, they must use God’s meanings, they cannot make meanings of their own .... if we make our own meanings, God will oblige us to answer our own questions, He will leave us in the void without the comfort of His Word’
That came across as such an important remark in terms of you, a player in the novel, you as novelist making meanings, artists in general making meanings without that deference to God or any other authority outside your own imagination.

BU: That’s perfectly true. That’s an interesting point, I think. It was especially relevant to that particular phase of theatrical history where there was a transition into a secular mode away from what is Bible-based and religious.

It’s rather like painting, isn’t it, where the freedom to move away from biblical and mythical topics is exercised?

BU: Yes, traditional forms, forms that are sanctioned and accepted, forms that are done over and over again. From them you move away into areas where you make your own forms or your own meanings and you take the responsibility, in other words, you become modern man. You become recognisably a creature that inhabits our world.

One of your characters says of modern man that he is not able to make his meanings any longer within a recognisable universe. This gives you a great go-ahead, doesn’t it, rather than saying ‘I’ve got to abide by the book or make it work according to accepted laws and rules’. That’s a great shift, isn’t it?

BU: That’s an enormous shift.

And it does give you a freedom and a responsibility? It makes you shiver as well, I’d think.

BU: The responsibility is there but ultimately you are not responsible for answers. You try to make questions. Writing fiction is basically a subversive activity; serious fiction is subversive. It doesn’t aim to confirm; it aims to question but escapes the responsibility of answer which is perhaps a dodge.

It’s a good dodge. Coming towards Losing Nelson, there’s a warning early on in it about writing history, or a biography as of Nelson, with a thesis, a terminus you’re aiming at from the outset. Yet that’s what the narrator is trying to do. And you warn us through him, through his mistakes, that that is not what the historian or perhaps the novelist is truly about: to start off knowing what you want to prove.

BU: In a certain sense I think biographers do usually start off, not with such a definite sense of what they want to prove, but with a certain intellectual or emotional bias. I don’t think that biography can be written without some degree of bias in the sense that it’s highly selective in its treatment, in its detail and in its emphasis. Somewhere it comes close to a fictional process just as my novel, Losing Nelson, is a fiction that contains a biography and the biography itself is to a certain degree fictionalised because it’s seen through a distorting lens, it’s the product of an obsessive vision. So there is for me an interesting interaction between what’s objective, what’s subjective, what is biography, what is fiction, where do they meet, what have they in common and what distinguishes them from each other.

And this is the track you’ve been on with what we might call your ‘historical novels’ or is it a new slant?

BU: It’s a new interest and a new slant and it may not survive; it may be simply singular to this novel. Very probably my next book, if I do another, will present a different set of technical problems and a different challenge and there’ll be a different excitement attached to it. The tensions will be different. I’ve simply moved in the direction of historical fiction because I’ve found it increasingly interesting to get that kind of distant focus on today, to be able to shed the dross and the clutter of our contemporary life and to get a more distilled sort of vision of the past, especially periods in the past which seem to cast light on things that we would feel to be contemporary issues.

Casting light. Do you feel that we are learning from the past? I’ve seen you dubbed a pessimist in this regard.

BU: Conrad was called a romantic pessimist and perhaps that’s what I am. I think sensibility has changed; we’re not so cruel in some directions as we used to be. We may be more cruel in other directions. It’s very difficult to do that sort of sum, to add up the items and to make a balance.I don’t feel that our world, our society, in any essential respect has been improved.

Would you think that novels such as yours might be able to assist us? That’s part of the hope, is it?

BU: Yes, that would be perhaps some sort of contribution, without wanting to seem pompous about it. After all, it’s a reasonable activity. It sounds a warning; it’s a voice for humanity and to that extent I hope it would be valuable. Fiction doesn’t change people’s lives ...unless it’s something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Moby Dick. Those are the kind of books maybe that change things but normally what you can hope for is to modify sensibility to some slight degree or to enhance the sense of life or to communicate a feeling of the possibilities of life.

This is a question that comes into focus for some reason out of the blue but it is one that’s there in my mind now. ‘Write about what you know’ has seemed often to be the good advice. I’m hearing voices now - and I wonder what you feel about this - which seem to say ‘write about what you don’t know’. It seems to me that you are probably setting out to find out things in order to write more, not about what you know, but about what you are going to discover and therefore present enticingly to a reader. Is that it?

BU: I think that’s a very valid point and very well expressed. I think that the fictional journey is putting out to sea. You don’t know altogether whether your equipment is seaworthy or whether you’re actually going to make it to the other side. You have a certain sense of a dynamic shape but there’s a lot left undetermined at the outset; you couldn’t hold it in your mind. You therefore embark on a journey of discovery. I should perhaps have added that as a further pleasure of the trade. You don’t know what you want to say until you’ve set out to say it. And so there is a discovery element and it’s a curiously exciting one and it’s associated with the research you do, especially for historical fiction where you stumble upon things in the course of research that quite unexpectedly open up a corridor for you. You see light; you have that sense of recognition; it’s a very charged activity.

It’s not writing necessarily out of what you know, your own background .Using that, of course, but going to find things in history that impinge, which resonate for you?

BU: Yes. What we know is what our mind is capable of encompassing, what our sensibility and our imagination can do. ‘Write about what you know’ is classic advice but to know what you know? None of the advocates of that approach attempts to supply that extra information one needs. How do you determine what you know? You don’t know what you know at the outset so in a sense that whole advice is riddled with difficulties.

It sounds like detective work. It seems to me, if we glance back at your alter egos, that some of them are sleuths, obsessed sleuths, aren’t they?

BU: They are. Pascali is a kind of sleuth. So are the players in Morality Play. It’s a sort of collective sleuthing.

To good effect. I’m glad that we can see that as being to good effect because sometimes you are bound to wonder. You can see that poor old Charles is not going to sleuth to good effect in your latest novel.
Let me ask you a question now about creative writing. Benson in Sugar and Rum is, of course, involved heavily and often very amusingly in helping selected individuals with their writing. Do you have any particular thoughts on teaching creative writing?

BU: I’ve just done two semesters at the University of Iowa. I came back in May. There’s a very famous workshop there, the oldest in the United States and it perhaps enjoys the most status (they’re very keen on status in the United States). I had highly selective postgraduate courses to run, like nothing we’ve got in Britain. There were 800 applicants for this course the year I was there and they took 25 people on the course -all graduates. So this is a highly talented and motivated and bright selection. So that was perhaps not typical because I wasn’t teaching them; we were just basically talking about the problems of writing fiction; we were just talking as colleagues. The only vestigial advantage I had was that I was much older and had actually done it over a long course of years whereas they were just starting out.

There's a lot of it going on here and more so in America. Do you regard it as a chancy game, both to get involved in yourself and to encourage others to feel they may benefit from it?

BU: I think that it can be beneficial. I find where I’ve been able to do most good is reading someone’s stuff, seeing them and talking to them face to face about their work, trying to understand directly from them what they want to do, what they are trying to do, trying to advise them in some way to see where their talent lies, to commune with themselves sufficiently so that they will understand their own talent and not waste months and years pursuing objectives that are not within their capacity - a besetting sin for writers at the beginning. They don’t understand what kind of creatures they are, they don’t understand what they can do. They try to do this or that; it might be fashionable; they might think it’s going to be profitable and they lose time. In that kind of way I think you can help; I don’t think you can teach people to write but you can do quite a bit in terms of improving techniques and advising on things like that. There are ways to construct narrative that you can talk about.

Can I finally turn to Losing Nelson? So much of what I admire in you is there partly because it’s so charged. Hero-worship is something many of us indulge in; it catches us on a nerve. We don’t and can’t say ‘this character is an alien who’s given to this strange pastime’. It’s something we all do. We worship pop stars or footballers or whatever. Hero-worship is central in that respect. And I was very struck with the ironies in your novel. I’m not always sure what the yeast is in your novels - there’s the yeast of humour, the yeast of fun and delight in words, isn’t there? I’m finding marvellous yeast all the time and here in the latest novel there is a distinctive presence of irony. The whole operation has a flavour of irony because Charles the narrator is pathetic and there’s an irony about his dedication which is a false dedication, a misguided dedication, and then right at the end he writes virtually a poem as he talks in rhapsody about finding Nelson at the very moment that we see that he’s lost everything.

BU: He’s lost himself.

And he’s killed in the process. Violence is an important ingredient in your novels. Was there a violent ending inherent in the novel from early on?

BU: No, I don’t think it was a necessary thing. It might have been possible to have made Charles draw back; it might have been possible to have given him an impulse to murder yet one more and to have drawn back from that. But as I wrote on it did begin to seem that the logic was there and that he went too far along a certain path which became basically irreversible. A point was reached and he’s lost himself.

Going to Naples was going to precipitate something, I felt sure. You need to get him there, don’t you, in order to have that final revelation, which ends in calamity for him?

It remains to ask what’s next for you.

BU: I’m going to write another book when I get through this publication business now and get back home to Italy. Quite a lot to do, odd jobs, before I can really think of a novel again but October, November, I suppose I’ll set in again with the winter and the wood-burning stoves and the sense of being sequestered and being secluded. I’ll start again but what I’m going to do I’m not that sure about.

So many questions remain but there we must stop to get you to Finchley Road for a reading. Very many thanks